Real Life: Chaos...

We are in some serious chaos in our house right now. We officially have keys to both our current and new house and we've started moving some things over to the new place. But I swear for every box of stuff-to-keep that we move over there I come home and find 3 boxes of stuff-to-toss. As we clear through stuff all the excess clutter and accumulation becomes even more glaringly obvious. It's exhausting. The good news is we've eliminated SO MUCH STUFF! We've taken two trips to the dump, a van-filled trip to Goodwill, had 2 weekends of yard sales, plus sold 5 garbage bags (so far!) full of little girls clothes. There's a whole lotta crap left but at least we're plowing through it. My goal has been to only take necessary items to the new place and we're doing pretty dang good. I've been really fighting my inner hoarder and just tossing tossing tossing. It feels liberating, but again - exhausting. I'm extremely excited to get settled in over at the new place and have all the loose ends and final steps done here. We've got to have carpet cleaners and pest control come do their thing. (I've never been required to show a receipt of pest control upon check-out before... gotta love Hawaiian living hehehe). Still working through getting the utilities switched. Wheeeeee. What an adventure. It's not like we haven't moved before (11 times in 14 years) but since we've been planted for "so long" (3 years) it's like doing it for the first time again. Royal pain in the butt.

I am splurging this time and doing something I've never done before. The idea is to ease my load and shrink my to-do-list a bit, but it may actually be stressing me out more than anything. We're hiring house cleaners to come do our final clean. I'd been wanting to do it but dragging my feet in a big way because I couldn't stomach the thought of paying someone big bucks to do something I was perfectly capable of doing (even though I really Really REALLY didn't want to have to do it myself...) Well I posted up a piece of furniture on Craigslist and indicated in my ad that we were moving and that's why we're getting rid of the furniture. I got a response from the sweetest girl. She and her fiance have recently started a housekeeping business specializing in move-out and real estate cleaning and offered to do our move-out cleaning and use the piece of furniture as a trade of sorts to off set the cost of their service! SOLD! It was just the nudge I needed so that I could let go of the idea that I can do it all and just accept some help. The problem? I'm horrified by the state of my home right now and I'm just a wreck over them coming today to see it so they can give me an estimate and determine the amount of time they'll need. As long as they don't laugh and shake their head at me and say "That'll be $2000 and will take us 72 hours" I guess I'm hiring cleaners. Crazy. And ugh! I know they've surely seen worse than what they'll walk into here, but I'm really truly embarrassed by the state of affairs in our house right now. I'm a lousy housekeeper anyway, but now we're adding all the bits and pieces of junk that settle to the ground when you're purging and packing. It's just a disaster. I don't know how to avoid this stage, either. It would be like that old saying about shoveling the walks while it's still snowing. Pointless. In any case, now I'm wasting precious purging and packing time to tidy for the cleaners. Who does that? I'm such a dork. (I'm also wasting precious purging and packing time to blog.... shhhh. I needed the break)

So anyway. There's our life right now. Chaos reigns supreme in the Campbell household right now. Can't wait to be done here, settled there and enjoying some central air! Thank goodness for some friends who've taken Molly for me so I can focus and work without distraction. (Someone should also take away my internet...) Anyway, back to work!! Wish us luck. I'm so ready for this to be DONE!!!